Cave painting lasted a hundred years, and then there was smoke signaling, which also lasted a hundred years, and of course there was the hundred years of yodeling, and then there was the printing press, which was invented almost precisely a hundred years ago, and so forth up to the present day—the day that Facebook picked up the hundred-year torch and ran with it. Quoth the Zuckster: “The next hundred years will be different for advertising, and it starts today.”
Yes, today is the first day of the rest of advertising’s life.
I like the way that Zuckerberg conflates “media” and “advertising.” It cuts through the noise. It simplifies. Get over your mainstream-media hang-ups, granddads. Editorial is advertorial. The medium is the message from our sponsor.
Marketing is conversational, says Zuckerberg, and advertising is social. There is no intimacy that is not a branding opportunity, no friendship that can’t be monetized, no kiss that doesn’t carry an exchange of value. “Facebook’s ad system,” goes a company press release, “serves Social Ads that combine social actions from your friends—such as a purchase of a product or review of a restaurant—with an advertiser’s message.”

…

He would also be amazed to discover that the fuzzy, low-definition TV screens that he knew (and on which he based his famous distinction between hot and cool media) have been replaced by crystal-clear, high-definition monitors, which more often than not are crawling with the letters of the alphabet. Our senses are more dominated by the need to maintain a strong, narrow visual focus than ever before. Electric media are social media, but they are also media of isolation. If the medium is the message, then the message of electric media has turned out to be far different from what McLuhan supposed.
That some of his ideas didn’t pan out wouldn’t have bothered him much. He was far more interested in playing with ideas than nailing them down. He intended his writings to be “probes” into the present and the future. He wanted his words to knock readers out of their intellectual comfort zones, to get them to entertain the possibility that their accepted patterns of perception might need reordering.

…

SMARTPHONES ARE HOT
October 21, 2014
THE LIGHTBULB, MARSHALL MCLUHAN wrote, is an example of a medium without content. Walk into a dark room and hit the light switch, and the bulb generates a new environment even though the bulb transmits no information. The idea of a medium without content is hard to grasp. It doesn’t make sense in the context of our assumptions about media. But it’s fundamental to understanding McLuhan’s contention that the medium is the message—that every medium creates an environment independent of the content or information it transmits.
So what are we to make of the smartphone, the medium of the moment, our portable environment? If, as McLuhan argued, the content of any new medium is an old medium, the content of the smartphone would seem to be all media: telephone, television, radio, cinema, printed book, electronic book, comic book, record, MP3, newspaper, magazine, letter, newsletter, email, peep show, library, school, lecture, ATM, desktop, laptop, love note, medical record, rap sheet.

Assumptions
“Xerography—every man’s brainpicker—heralds the times of instant publishing.
Anybody can now become both author and publisher. Take any books on any subject
and custom-make your own book by simply xeroxing a chapter from this one, a
chapter from that one—instant steal!
As new technologies come into play, people become less and less convinced of the
importance of self expression. Teamwork succeeds private eﬀort.“
—Marshall McLuhan, The Medium is the MESSAGE
This book was wri en in a collaborative Book Sprint by six core authors
over a ﬁve-day period in January 2010. The six starting authors each come
from diﬀerent perspectives, as are the contributors who were adding to this
living body of text.
Six months later a new group of collaborators convened in New York City,
while several of the ﬁrst group also contributed simultaneously from NYC,
Berlin and San Francisco.

…

And it
is this thought, this form-of-life, that, abandoning naked life to ‘Man’ and
to the ‘Citizen,’ who c lothe it temporarily and represent it with their
‘rights,’ must bec ome the guiding c onc ept and the unitary c enter of the
c oming politic s.”
—Giorgio Agamben, Mea ns without End: Notes on Politics. [University of
Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, London: 2000]
25
What this book is…
To begin looking at those futures, we look back to others who have looked
into the future. Marshall McLuhan’s quote above, from “The Medium is the
MESSAGE” give us our ﬁrst clue about all of these assumptions we are
making. We are talking about media, we are talking about freedom, we are
talking about technologies, and we are talking about culture.
McLuhan’s prophetic u erance, several decades before the photocopier
fueled the punk cut-up design aesthetic, or the profusion of home-brew
zines, is still unmet. We are still chasing it. Mainstream culture continues to
consolidate around block buster ﬁlms, books, and music.

If I’m the guerrilla and I want to buy something, I construct the transaction offline, and when I’m ready, run out into the middle of the field, clamp my transmitter onto a clothesline, press “enter,” transmit for 25 seconds, pack up my gear, and disappear into the forest. How the hell do you stop that? You don’t. That’s the simple answer, you don’t. But that’s just the beginning.
9.5. Separating the Medium and the Message
Once you realize that money has become a content type, that transactions have been disconnected from the medium, some really important secondary characteristics emerge. You see, the medium is the message, as someone famous once said. The primary reason the medium is the message is because the medium constrains, transforms, and in many cases, distorts the message.
When your medium is TV, your message is 18 minutes long, interrupted by advertising slots. That is your message; there is no other format you can fit there. So, you make a message that fits that medium. And you start assigning the value of your message based on the mistaken assumption that it is equivalent to the cost of production.

pages: 204words: 61,491

Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business
by
Neil Postman,
Jeff Riggenbach Ph.

This change-over has dramatically and irreversibly shifted the content and meaning of public discourse, since two media so vastly different cannot accommodate the same ideas. As the influence of print wanes, the content of politics, religion, education, and anything else that comprises public business must change and be recast in terms that are most suitable to television.
If all of this sounds suspiciously like Marshall McLuhan’s aphorism, the medium is the message, I will not disavow the association (although it is fashionable to do so among respectable scholars who, were it not for McLuhan, would today be mute). I met McLuhan thirty years ago when I was a graduate student and he an unknown English professor. I believed then, as I believe now, that he spoke in the tradition of Orwell and Huxley—that is, as a prophesier, and I have remained steadfast to his teaching that the clearest way to see through a culture is to attend to its tools for conversation.

…

But how much more divergence there is in world view among different cultures can be imagined when we consider the great number and variety of tools for conversation that go beyond speech. For although culture is a creation of speech, it is recreated anew by every medium of communication—from painting to hieroglyphs to the alphabet to television. Each medium, like language itself, makes possible a unique mode of discourse by providing a new orientation for thought, for expression, for sensibility. Which, of course, is what McLuhan meant in saying the medium is the message. His aphorism, however, is in need of amendment because, as it stands, it may lead one to confuse a message with a metaphor. A message denotes a specific, concrete statement about the world. But the forms of our media, including the symbols through which they permit conversation, do not make such statements. They are rather like metaphors, working by unobtrusive but powerful implication to enforce their special definitions of reality.

It does not matter if it is delivered
over the air, via cable, or with the aid of a dish; played back
from tape, digital video disc (DVD), or a digital video recorder’s (DVR) hard drive; watched on a plasma screen, an ancient
console, or in the car (a particularly terrifying development for
those of us who drive the freeways). Television is always the
same: to watch it is to track an electronic download in real
time—a narrativized progress bar with a laugh track.3 Marshall
McLuhan was half right: the medium is the message, but the
messages also deﬁne the medium.
And what of the computer? The challenge it has mounted
to television over the past decade has little to do with one
machine being replaced by another—in the manner of 78s
being supplanted by LPs, vinyl records by 8-tracks and cassette
tapes, and compact discs (CDs) by MP3s; or videotape recorders by laser discs to be followed in turn by DVDs, video on
demand, and DVRs.

…

Often invoking “quality shows” like The Sopranos and The Wire,
the capitulationists wax on about narrative complexity, visual
sophistication, time shifting via DVRs, the release of whole
seasons on DVD, and the increasingly intertwined hypercontextualization of television via extratextual material on the Web,
including podcasting and mobisodes on mobile phones, all to
make the claim that television has ﬁnally reached a critical
mass of cultural importance. Yet if the formulation that the
medium is the message holds true, the unfortunate fact is that
the medium has not turned out to be all that good for us in
heavy usage, even if some of the programming is as good as
contemporary ﬁlm.8
7
CHAPTER 1
Television’s junk culture spews the high fructose corn syrup of
the imagination, and as a result of our addiction to the box,
we have contracted cultural diabetes. I am fully aware of the
critiques of my antitelevision position from both the Left and
the Right, but before we get to the cultural studies rhetoric of
audience empowerment and the laissez-faire bromides about
the market, let me unpack my metaphors, ﬁrst with some diagnostics, and then with some examples.

After the arrival of mass-produced books, we became “typographical man,” and our voices lost some power. We were encouraged by the technologies of writing and printing to take on some kinds of input and discouraged from taking on others. Today we privilege the information we take in through our eyes while reading and pay less heed to information that arrives via our other senses. In plainest terms, McLuhan delivers his famous line: “The medium is the message.” What you use to interact with the world changes the way you see the world. Every lens is a tinted lens.
• • • • •
A latter-day King Thamus or Squarciafico would grumble at me for using my phone to call up my partner’s number. In fact, I’ve never known Kenny’s number by heart. But it’s not something I worry about or seek to fix. Likewise, if adults in 2064 manage to entirely outsource their memories to digital aids, they won’t begrudge their situation at all, but will rejoice in their mental freedom.

…

Today they’re a charming part of the mise-en-scène. Time settles everything. One day soon we’ll contentedly discuss dreams that appeared to us as bright blue bubbles of text.
My day’s activities included: a visit to the bank to pay a bill; sending a printed chapter of my book to Matthew in Ottawa; Mailbox (11:45!); 40 minutes ogling Shaughnessy mansions; 30 minutes reading Coupland’s riff on McLuhan’s The Medium Is the Message.
But nothing feels productive (i.e., nothing makes me money).
Increasingly disturbed by how hamstrung my work-life is without Internet. I can’t take on new projects, or even invoice for old ones. I sweep and tidy my desktop instead. My free time is capacious. Found myself disappointed when I checked my toenails and saw it wasn’t time to clip them yet.
August 26
Bertrand Russell says in Conquest of Happiness that the ability to fill leisure time intelligently is the last product of civilization.

Perhaps even altered perspectives and planes.
Me (wondering Umm, if you say so.
whether my
boss is a fool or
a genius)
My boss
Exactly.
Survival requires keeping your head down. There was no point in resisting
the latest fad, I just nodded and kept doing what I always did – trying to
make money. No management fad lasted long. Before you knew it, we
would have a new ‘business model’ and would be entering a ‘new paradigm’.
The medium is the message
Complex business decisions require numerous management retreats.
Management rarely advances; they are usually in retreat. Conferences, strategy
sessions and other talkfests take up management time. Managers are constantly huddled together with the consultant du jour discussing business
models and strategies.
The locations are remote, luxurious five-star resorts; the isolation is to
avoid distractions.

…

Marty said it with
immense gravitas; the financial journalists reported it verbatim. His template for success was in accord with that of Rumsfeld. ‘I think I probably
said that to The Washington Post although I don’t recall precisely what I
said. But I’m pretty sure it’s roughly what I say all the time.’ 6
In the 1960s a Canadian academic, Marshall McLuhan, built a reputation on his views of modern culture. He is best remembered for the pithy
phrase ‘the medium is the message’. Nobody quite knew what McLuhan
was getting at. In press coverage of finance and markets, the medium is the
only message. McLuhan also understood the value of the secret information
that everybody in financial markets covets: ‘This information is top security.
When you have read it destroy yourself.’
Overwhelming force
Overwhelming force is the preferred strategy of larger dealers. In August
2004, Citigroup sold €11 billion of bonds through an electronic trading
system known as MTS.

After all, Hitler showed how radio could be a formidable instrument of resonance for one-way single-purpose messages. What TV represented, first of all, was the end of the Gutenberg Galaxy – that is, of a system of communication essentially dominated by the typographic mind and the phonetic alphabet order.18 For all his critics (generally turned off by the obscurity of his mosaic language), Marshall McLuhan struck a universal chord when, in all simplicity, he declared that the “medium is the message”:
The mode of TV image has nothing in common with film or photo, except that it offers also a nonverbal gestalt or posture of forms. With TV, the viewer is the screen. He is bombarded with light impulses that James Joyce called “The Charge of the Light Brigade”… The TV image is not a still shot. It is not a photo in any sense, but a ceaselessly forming contour of things limned by the scanning-finger.

…

From the perspective of the medium, different communication modes tend to borrow codes from each other: interactive educational programs look like video games; newscasts are constructed as audiovisual shows; trial cases are broadcast as soap operas; pop music is composed for MTV; sports games are choreographed for their distant viewers, so that their messages become less and less distinguishable from action movies; and the like. From the perspective of the user (both as receiver and sender, in an interactive system), the choice of various messages under the same communication mode, with easy switching from one to the other, reduces the mental distance between various sources of cognitive and sensorial involvement. The issue at stake is not that the medium is the message: messages are messages. And because they keep their distinctiveness as messages, while being mixed in their symbolic communication process, they blur their codes in this process, creating a multifaceted semantic context made of a random mixture of various meanings.
Finally, perhaps the most important feature of multimedia is that they capture within their domain most cultural expressions, in all their diversity.

Lil even enjoyed the dice's sudden passion for awkward sexual positions, although when the dice ordered me to penetrate her from thirteen distinctly different positions before reaching my climax, she became quite angry as I was trying to maneuver her into position eleven. When she wondered why I was getting so many strange whims these days, I suggested that perhaps I was pregnant.
But the medium is the message, and the dice decisions, no matter how pleasant they might sometimes be to Lil or Arlene or others, acted to separate me from people. Sexual dice decisions were particularly effective in destroying natural intimacy X" convincing a woman that one awkward sexual position is all 'that will satisfy you when she feels otherwise). Such dice commands obviously involved my being able to manipulate (both psychologically and physically) the woman as well as myself.

…

One thing I've learned in my miscellaneous career is that any good creating that gets done gets done despite my efforts at controlling the writing, not because of them. In so far as I'm the Dice Man I can write easily in almost any form the Die chooses, but as serious, old, ambitious Luke, I run into as many blocks as a rat in an insoluble maze. Obedience of the Die implies with every fall that rational, purposive man doesn't know what he's doing so he might as well relax and enjoy the fumbling Die. `The medium is the message,' once said the noted psychic Edgar Cayce, and so is mine.
Walk on, I've learned. I let my pen and the Die do what my mind boggles at doing. The falling Die and moving pen think for themselves and the interposition of ego, artistic conscience, style or organization usually weighs things down. These inhibiting forces removed, the ink flows freely, space is filled, words are formed; ideas spring full-blown on the page like giants from dragons' teeth.

We can now take for granted following stories with multiple endings, or choosing our own paths through narratives, poems that shuffle themselves into different shades of meaning, multi-stream multiscreen fiction with multitasking audience members each finding their own meanings, process pieces that once set in motion will continue to reveal additional evolutions, algorithmic music generators that never repeat… These kinds of meta-artistic creations point us toward new uninhabited potentials for expressing our experience the way the mind knows it subjectively, the way we think that we think we perceive. I guess this is sort of an ultimate case of “The medium is the message.” Ted created new media initially because he needed them as an artistic being. Then instead of populating them with his own art, he made his life’s work the struggle to give us as much freedom of structure as he could, so we can express, interconnect and begin to capture better the ways we experience thought in our minds. Or at least that was, I think, the vision before other people’s ideas and interests pointed the Internet’s evolution in the directions it took.

It’s an elemental point: the television does not become a computing device; the various computing devices become remarkably satisfactory entertainment devices, not just making entertainment available at any time and in any place but pushing entertainment—professionally made, scripted narratives—into the realm of digital activity.
The devices themselves mean that digital media executives become as reliant—or more reliant—on writers, actors, directors, and producers as on programmers.
13
MORE BOXES
“Digital convergence” turns out not so much to be about bringing computing to your television but about bringing more television to your television.
Accept that the medium is the message (in Douglas Coupland’s succinct explanation of Marshall McLuhan’s still opaque aphorism—more than half a century later still opaque: “The ostensible content of all electronic media is insignificant; it is the medium itself that has the greater impact on the environment, a fact bolstered by the now medically undeniable fact that the technologies we use every day begin, after a while, to alter the way our brains work, and hence the way we experience the world”), but what is the medium?

It was the wrong level of description for
him, so he was going to struggle on with software patches for a device that could never work reliably.
An education that forces people to specialize in hardware, or
software, sends them out into the world with an erroneous impression that the two are easily separated. It is even embodied in our legal code, in the workings of the U.S. Patent Office. A patent must
scrupulously distinguish between apparatus claims, on hardware,
and method claims, on software. This means that "the medium is
the message" is actually illegal: the message must be separated from
the medium for patent protection.
The best patent examiners recognize that new technology is
stretching the boundaries of old rules, and are flexible about interpreting them. The worst examiners refuse to accept that a single entity can simultaneously embody a physical apparatus and a logical
method. I've spent years winding my way through the legal system
with a particularly obtuse examiner who insists on trying to split an
invention into its component hardware and software, even though
the function of the device cannot be seen in either alone but arises
only through their interaction.
192
+
WHEN THINGS START TO THINK
Companies can't help but notice that these kinds of distinctions
no longer make sense.

We are better off for this change and it is part of a broader trend of how the production of value—including beauty, suspense, and education—is becoming increasingly interior to our minds.
4
IM, CELL PHONES, AND FACEBOOK
It’s not just that we have more music, more text, more websites, and more TV for mixing our personal cultural blends. We also have new media for experiencing and expressing ourselves and for building the richness of our lives.
Marshall McLuhan asserted that “the medium is the message” and later economists Harold Innis and Leonard Dudley showed how communications media shape human lives. Over the last fifteen years the rapid advance of digital technology has accelerated this process beyond expectations. Many of us are still trying to catch up, so I intend this chapter to be a simple guide to how some of the new communications media—such as instant messaging, cell phone texting, and micro-blogging—matter for the emotional side of our lives.

It’s easy, amid the turbulence of a rapidly evolving information age, to default to dialectical grumbling. The curmudgeons among us are vaguely uneasy about the attention people pay to their phones, and pine for the days of unhurried concentration, while the digital hipsters equate such nostalgia with Luddism and boredom, and believe that increased connection is the foundation for a utopian future. Marshall McLuhan declared that “the medium is the message,” but our current conversation on these topics seems to imply that “the medium is morality”—either you’re on board with the Facebook future or see it as our downfall.
As I emphasized in this book’s introduction, I have no interest in this debate. A commitment to deep work is not a moral stance and it’s not a philosophical statement—it is instead a pragmatic recognition that the ability to concentrate is a skill that gets valuable things done.

But this is the elephant-based Hannibal narrative we’ve always had, and any story contradicting it would be built on the same kind of modern conjecture and ancient text. As far as the world is concerned, it absolutely happened. Even if it didn’t happen, it happened.
This is the world that is not there.
Don’t Tell Me What Happens. I’m Recording It.
Television is an art form where the relationship to technology supersedes everything else about it. It’s one realm of media where the medium is the message, without qualification. TV is not like other forms of consumer entertainment: It’s slippier and more dynamic, even when it’s dumb. We know people will always read, so we can project the future history of reading by considering the evolution of books. (Reading is a static experience.) We know music will always exist, so we can project a future history of rock ’n’ roll by placing it in context with other genres of music.

Whether a cable television system, a complex of automatic teller machines, or an airline computer reservation system, a network exists not as an end in itself but as a convenience to those who create and consume an underlying product: a Hollywood movie, a banking service, a seat on an airplane. The sociologist Marshall McLuhan’s 1964 assertion that “the medium is the message” is by more recent standards a quaintly over-enthusiastic characterization of the Information Age. Even if the medium is the message, it is not the product. Though it may enhance value, it creates nothing. By themselves computers, networks, and systems can no more fly people between cities than they can print money or direct actors.
Yet in the mid-1980s it almost seemed otherwise to Frank Lorenzo. New York Air and the resurgent Continental Airlines, were, taken together, the largest airline operation in the country without a direct electronic tie-in to the travel agent community.

Robert Scoble, now head of FastCompany.TV, was the poster child for Locke’s argument when he blogged from inside Microsoft, in his own voice rather than that of the corporate Borg. He almost single-handedly turned around the reputation of even this company online. Your products and your customers are your ads, and so are your employees.
The best way to burnish a brand is no longer to rub up against media properties like Vogue or the Super Bowl. The best way today is to rub up against people: Sally the blogger or Joe the Facebook friend. The medium is the message and the customer is the medium. Sally is the new Vogue.
Separate the functions of an ad agency today—media buying, research and data, and creative. What happens to each?
Media buying, under Locke’s theory, now becomes more important than messaging. When your customer is your ad, media doesn’t mean content, it means people. Networks of people will become a force in advertising. Already, media companies, including Forbes and Reuters, are running blog ad networks for marketers.

More than anything else, this invention was responsible for the individuation, specialization, mechanization, and visual orientation that developed during the reign of scribal culture after the fif eenth century. Print, McLuhan wrote, rendered oral culture (the preceding mode of consciousness) obsolete. He also believed that the electronic media of the twentieth century—telegraph, telephone, movies, radio, television,and digital computers—had brought mankind to the threshold of a new revolution in consciousness.
McLuhan’s claim that “the medium is the message” refle ts his conviction that whatever the surface content of a specifi message, it is the technology of its medium that has the most lasting formative impact on the consciousness of human receivers: “If a technology is introduced either from within or from without a culture, and if it gives new stress or ascendancy to one or another of our senses, the ratio among all our senses is altered.

What is the relationship between the making and maintenance of Liberty Park in Lower Manhattan (its mail, its legal procedures, its noise statutes) with the making and maintenance of the broader ideas and actions of a growing movement that exists as much in the media and social networking as it does in disobedient reclamations of the commons? For a month and a half, it has been an almost-sacred tenet of OWS that the medium is the message, that the reclamation of privatized public space not only for engaged citizenship, but also for free food, shelter, clothing, healthcare, libraries, education, wifi and more, is OWS politics. Logistics, the claim goes, are politics. And yet even to those most dedicated to that position, it rarely feels like enough. Bureaucracy rarely feels transcendent.
In the latest developments of the bureaucracies of anarchy in OWS, these contentions over the spaces of politics have been brought to the fore in the single most controversial GA proposal in the movement’s young life: to change the very process of consensus itself, and to move from a nightly General Assembly to a Spokes Council Model.

The same may be starting to happen for book authors.)
Beyond that, there are numerous brilliant thinkers, researchers, and inventors who would never contemplate writing a book. They, too, now have the opportunity to become one of the world’s teachers. Their efforts, conveyed vividly from their own mouths, will bring knowledge, understanding, passion, and inspiration to millions.
When Marshall McLuhan said, “The medium is the message,” he meant, among other things, that every new medium spawns its own unexpected units of communication. In addition to the Web page, the blog, and the tweet, we are witnessing the rise of riveting online talks, long enough to inform and explain, short enough for mass impact.
The Web has allowed us to rediscover fire.
The Rise of Social Media Is Really a Reprise
June Cohen
Director of media, TED Conference; TED Talks
In the early days of the Web, when I worked at HotWired, I thought mainly about the new.

In spite of being toolmakers of our digital future, Michael and Xochi Birch aren’t prescient. And the truth about the Battery—whether or not it has had a chance to get its jeans on—is that the well-meaning but deluded Birches have unintentionally created one of the least diverse and most exclusive places on earth.
The twentieth-century media guru Marshall McLuhan, who, in contrast with the Birches, was distinguished by his prescience, famously said that the “medium is the message.” But on Battery Street in downtown San Francisco, it’s the building that is the message. Rather than an unclub, the Battery is an untruth. It offers a deeply troubling message about the gaping inequalities and injustices of our new networked society.
In spite of its relaxed dress code and self-proclaimed commitment to cultural diversity, the Battery is as opulent as the most marble-encrusted homes of San Francisco’s nineteenth-century gilded elite.

Making News
The conduit metaphor suggests that information sits around in discrete lumps waiting to be loaded onto a carrier. Newspapers, for example, appear to be freighted with news that they carry out to readers. But, as we suggested in chapter 1, news is not some naturally occurring object that journalists pick up and stick on paper. It is made and shaped by journalists in the context of the medium and the audience. There's no need to go as far as Marshall McLuhan's claim that the "medium is the message" to see that the medium is not an indifferent carrier here. 17
The newspaper, then, is rather like the librarynot simply a collection of news, but a selection and a reflection. And the selection process doesn't just "gather news," but weaves and shapes, developing stories in accordance with available space and
Page 186
priorities. Properties of the newspaper inherently convey these priorities to readers.

Don't know that it's got anything to do with this, though."
"A software audit? Didn't she know Licencing and Compliance handles that on a blanket departmentwide basis? We were updated on it about a year ago."
"We were--" I sit down heavily on the cheap plastic visitor's chair. "What are the chances this McLuhan
guy put the idea into Harriet's mind in the first place? What are the chances it isn't connected?"
"McLuhan. The medium is the message. SCORPION STARE. Why do I have a bad feeling about this?" Andy sends me a worried look.
" 'Nother possibility, boss-man. What if it's an internal power play? The software audit's a cover, Purloined Letter style, hiding something fishy in plain sight where nobody will look at it twice until it's too late."
"Nonsense, Bridget's not clever enough to blow a project wide open just to discredit--" His eyes go wide.

When there is a direct communication with the senses, on the other hand, the difference becomes a lot clearer. Like a fluorescent lightbulb, which will perceptibly flicker at 60 hertz along with the alternating current of the house, digital technologies are almost perceptibly on/off. They create an environment, regardless of the content they are expressing. This is what Marshall McLuhan meant by “the medium is the message.” A lightbulb creates an environment, even though it has no content. Even without a slide or movie through which to project an image onto the wall, the light itself creates an environment where things can happen that otherwise wouldn’t. It is an environment of light.
With digital technology, the environment created is one of choice. We hop from choice to choice with no present at all.

It will be easier to decide that a radio signal is artificial in origin than to decode the meaning in the signal. If you doubt that, recall that we can’t communicate with primates that share 99 percent of our DNA. Now imagine that we’re trying to communicate with aliens who might not even have DNA, aliens of unknown function and form. We assume that if they send radio signals, they must be intelligent. In other words, the choice of a means of communication is very telling. The medium is the message.
The main approach to SETI continues to be radio astronomy. But the power of modern lasers suggests an alternative. If a civilization on a planet was using rapidly pulsed lasers to send signals rather than radio transmitters, the pulses might stand out against the steady light of the nearby star. Optical SETI can be done with small telescopes if the stars are nearby. Pulsed lasers are now powerful enough to match the Sun’s energy—but only for radiation traveling in one direction and only for a billionth of a second.

While it could be argued that these questions can be traced to Nikola Tesla’s discussion of global wireless “central nervous centers,” it is ultimately Marshall McLuhan who should be credited. In his 1964 book Understanding Media, McLuhan described an interconnected and interactive form of media that sounds shockingly similar to the Internet and, one might argue, virtual reality. Earlier, in The Gutenberg Galaxy, he had coined the term “global village,” which is still used to describe the Internet today. McLuhan also coined the phrase “The medium is the message,” meaning that the way information is conveyed in society has a more profound effect than the actual information. These concepts are starting to engage with the question of how culture would work in an electronically connected society, but McLuhan was primarily concerned with communication and media, not economics. That wouldn’t come until later.
Older readers might remember the in-home shopping networks of the late 1970s.

Hurnan ingenuity had now advanced to the point where technology could produce a nationwide, one-mind experience, previously thought to reside only in the realm of the mystic. McLuhan, who saw so much, could have helped us see through that crap. Instead, because of his celebration of our electronic connection, our planetary-tribal village, he effec-
29
INTRODUCTION
tively encouraged support for the techno-mystical-unification theme. His words entered the arena of talk show patter and word- play. "Hot and coo1." "The medium is the message." People struggled to find concrete meaning in these phrases. They became the basis of hundreds of conferences and thousands of cocktail party debates. Most people were satisfied that they understood something if they grasped that, because of tele- vision, we were now vibrating together to the same electronic drumbeat. Joyful at what looked like a new and positive unity, we failed to perceive, nor did McLuhan help us become con- scious of three critical facts, 1) it was only one drumbeat, 2) this drum could be played only by a handful of players, 3) the identity of the players was determined by the tech- nology itself.

Just as rapid transit, especially air travel, can be perceived as having made the world a smaller place, wireless transmission of images in the form of television signals can be argued to have shrunk the world, perhaps making space disappear completely as a significant factor in our lives. But, just like rapid transit, the influence of electronic media on our perception of space is more complex than this. Spaces are connected to one another using sets of rules that have more to do with politics, power, and preference than with physics. When Marshall McLuhan, a pioneering Canadian thinker in media studies and author of the influential slogan “the medium is the message,” described the impact of new media as having converted the world into a kind of “global village,” this is precisely the kind of transformation in the use of space that he meant. Like villagers, we form allegiances, links, and unions with other individuals, but the far reach of invisible waves makes physical distance irrelevant to the formation of these connections.
The mind-warping power of television has in some ways worked in concert with other space-devouring developments of the past century.

When I send a message out, it is hurtful if I don’t get anything back.”
Mandy presses her point. For her, the hurt of no response follows from what she calls the “formality” of instant messenging. In her circle, instant messages are sent in the evening, when one is working on homework on a laptop or desktop. This presumed social and technical setting compels a certain gravitas. Mandy’s case rests on an argument in the spirit of Marshall McLuhan. The medium is the message: if you are at your computer, the medium is formal, and so is the message. If you are running around, shopping, or having a coffee, and you swipe a few keys on your phone to send a text, the medium is informal, and so is the message, no matter how much you may have edited the content.
The defenders of the “nonchalance” of instant messaging stand their ground: when you send an IM, it is going to a person “who has maybe ten things going on.”

As he wrote later, “The best outputs that time-sharing can provide are crude green-tinted line drawings and square-wave musical tones.
Children, however, are used to finger paints, color television and stereophonic records, and they usually find the things that can be accomplished with a low-capacity time-sharing system insufficiently stimulating to maintain their interest.” Or as Kay and his colleague Adele Goldberg wrote later: “If ‘the medium is the message,’ then the message of low-bandwidth time-sharing is ‘blah.’” When his turn came to design a programming language at PARC, he would invest it with several unmistakable elements of Papert’s system: its visual feedback, its accessibility to novices, and its orientation to the wonder and creativity of childhood. Partially in deference to this last factor, he would call it “Smalltalk.” While Kay was taking these first mind-blowing excursions into Ideaspace, the caliber of graphics research at Utah was exploding.

Kay, like Engelbart, put the human user at the center of his design. He wanted to build technologies to extend the intellectual reach of humans. He did, however, differ from Engelbart in his conception of cyberspace. Engelbart thought the intellectual relation between humans and information could be compared to driving a car; computer users would sail along an information highway. In contrast, Kay had internalized McLuhan’s insight that “the medium is the message.” Computing, he foresaw, would become a universal, overarching medium that would subsume speech, music, text, video, and communications.
Neither of those visions found traction at SAIL. Les Earnest, brought to SAIL by ARPA officials in 1965 to provide management skills that McCarthy lacked, has written that many of the computing technologies celebrated as coming out of SRI and PARC were simultaneously designed at SAIL.

The authors’ key insight is that the new electronic systems that mediate access to such forms—from online databases to search engines—are anything but the unproblematic and highly predictable purveyors of information that we often take them to be. These platforms actually transform and modify the information they carry; it’s one of the few cases in which Marshall McLuhan’s famous dictum that the medium is the message is actually worth heeding, at least partially, for it forces us to confront the information infrastructure that gets us the information we want. There is a certain shallow attitude toward such infrastructure—an attitude that French philosopher Bruno Latour calls “double click”—that treats communication and the production of knowledge as relatively uncomplicated and frictionless affairs that could happen without mediators like databases and search engines.

The aim of privatizing government itself has existed for decades, but the attacks of September 11, 2001, accelerated the process in the United States because the Bush administration saw its “war on terror” as a boon for the private sector. “Now wars and disaster responses are so fully privatized,” Klein argues, “that they are themselves the new market: there is no need to wait until after the war for the boom—the medium is the message.”15
These ideological changes are implemented by force, despite the routine opposition to them expressed by populations across the world—if they know about the policies at all. Resistance occurs because inefficiency, abuse, corruption, and death cloud the sunny rhetoric offered by privatization’s loudest defenders.16 Still, all too often, corporate power wins. The social and environmental costs of this phenomenon are what I document in these pages.

Another interestIng nugget was that children really need as much or more power than adults were wIllIng to settle for when using a time-sharing system. The best that tIme-sharing has to offer is slow control of crude wire-frame green-tInted graphIcs and square-wave musIcal tones. The kids, on the other hand, are used to finger-paints, water colors, color televI- sIon, real musical instruments, and records. If "the medium is the message," the message of low bandwidth time-sharing IS "blah." (19 88 [1977],255-56) Here began, in thought at least, a long series of Kay's experiments with chil- dren and computers, not to mention the ongoing vision of children as the most accomplished and demanding users of personal computers. According to Alan Kay, PARC management refused support for his Dyna- book project in the spring of 1972.

Each form is defined in exquisite and absolutely precise detail, and each carries a message.
Basically everything in the body—whether it belongs there or not—either carries a form on its surface, a marking, a piece that identifies it as a unique entity, or its entire form and being comprises that message. (In this last case, it is pure information, pure message, and it embodies perfectly Marshall McLuhan’s observation that “the medium is the message.”)
Reading the message, like reading braille, is an intimate act, an act of contact and sensitivity. Everything in the body communicates in this way, sending and receiving messages by contact.
This communication occurs in much the same way that a round peg fits into a round hole. When they fit together, when they match each other in size, the peg “binds” to the hole. Although the various shapes in the body are usually more complex than a round peg, the concept is the same.

It had just been the same money that had flowed around ever faster. When asked what happened to his fortune, the soccer star George Best responded: “I spent 90 percent of my money on women, drink and fast cars. The rest I wasted!” Slowly, the world awoke to the realization that it had wasted a staggering amount of wealth that did not exist in the first place.
6. Money Honey
The scholar Marshall McLuhan elliptically noted that “the medium is the message.” The medium is newspapers, books, television, and increasingly the Internet. The message now was money. Banker Walter Wriston anticipated it: “Information about money has become almost as important as money itself.”1
Once, newspapers gave more space to sport than financial news. When asked about the reason, Richard Harwood, the assistant managing editor of the Washington Post, replied: “I guess it is because we think sport is more interesting to readers than business and economics.

To understand the full impact of the empathic surge brought on by monotheism and the world’s axial movements, we need to understand how script cognition differs from oral cognition. Both forms of communication allow human beings to tell their story, but the narratives they tell have the unmistakable mark of the communication media being used. That’s because modes of communication help create the very consciousness that they also manage. As the late Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan observed, “The medium is the message.”
Oral consciousness relies on hearing, while script consciousness relies on sight. This difference alone accounts for the profound change in human consciousness that distinguishes a written culture from an oral one. Hearing is the most internalizing of the senses. While touch, smell, and taste also penetrate the interior of one’s being, hearing is a more powerful experience as anyone who has ever enjoyed music knows so well.

To the talking heads on the Sunday panel shows, it was obvious: the man who went into the showdown with Lyndon Johnson would have to be a TV star. It simply couldn’t be Nixon. The logic of the times demanded it.
This new political science had a prophet, and his name was Marshall McLuhan—“the new spokesman of the electronic age,” as the blurb to his 1964 magnum opus, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, called him. A key hinge of that book’s argument that “the medium is the message” was his exegesis of the Kennedy-Nixon debates. He thought Nixon resembled the railway lawyer in westerns “who signs leases that are not in the best interests of the folks in the little town…. Without TV, Nixon had it made.” The influence of TV had only accelerated in the eight years since. That was how, in defiance of all the doughy-faced bald men whose constituencies returned them to Congress year after year, in defiance of the presidential landslide won in 1964 by the jug-eared, poky-voiced Texan, pundits proclaimed with such confidence that 1968 would be the year of “Republican Camelot.”